Abstract
The aim of this study is to investigate the linguistic patterns of moral persuasion in Saadi’s Bustan through the application of Martin and White’s Appraisal Theory within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics. Despite the unparalleled status of Bustan in Persian didactic literature, previous studies have largely focused on aesthetic aspects and traditional literary criticism, leaving a noticeable gap in coherent linguistic analyses that explain Saadi’s meaning-making and evaluative strategies. Adopting a mixed qualitative–quantitative approach and purposive sampling, this study compiled a corpus of 215 key couplets selected from different chapters of the Bustan. In total, 842 evaluative markers were identified and coded according to the three principal subsystems of Appraisal Theory: Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation. The findings show that within the moral discourse of the Bustan, the Attitude system is the most frequently used evaluative resource, accounting for 55.2% of the instances. Within this system, the Judgement category plays a central role (52.6%), indicating Saadi’s predominantly behavior-oriented approach to assessing human actions according to social and religious norms. Furthermore, analysis of the Engagement system (19%) reveals the use of dialogic contraction in didactic passages to reinforce the certainty of moral propositions, alongside a tendency toward dialogic expansion in passages reflecting experiential and mystical contemplation. Finally, through the strategic use of the Graduation system (25.8%), Saadi intensifies positive and negative moral polarities, making them more salient for the audience. These findings suggest that the Bustan is not merely a collection of direct moral admonitions, but rather embodies a multilayered “grammar of ethics” that systematically and often implicitly aligns readers with the text’s worldview and underlying ideology.